'The Patient Is the Exorcist': Interview with M. Scott Peck

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The first case [came through a] referral from Malachi Martin, who was my mentor and to whom the book is dedicated. A very extraordinary man, without question the world's greatest authority on the subject [of exorcism]. Some people criticize me as if I followed Malachi Martin as if he hypnotized me and I believed everything he said. In fact, Malachi often was a liar.

Oh, without question. But he lied about other things. He lied about his own identity a great deal.

Right. That was in later years somewhat. He was not always right, but boy as far as my case, he batted a 1000.

Since the early 1960s, since what's been called the Charismatic movement within the Christian church, a significant number of Christians believe that virtually every problem a human can have is of demonic origin. These Charismatics developed a kind of mini-exorcism technique--which they called a deliverance--to deliver people from evil spirits: a demon of alcoholism, a demon of lust, a demon of masturbation, a demon of overeating and so forth.

They developed this very mild procedure where you just sit with the patient in prayer for a period up to about 6 hours. You can often discern if there is some demonic influence and you can cast it out, as occurred in the second of my cases, which was temporary successful.

I'm not against deliverance. I wouldn't even diagnose a case of possession or try to do an exorcism without doing a deliverance first.

Exactly.

Some Charismatics, including a man named Francis MacNutt, held that there are four levels of demonic involvement. The first they simply call temptation, which I myself doubt as most of the time as demonic. I think we're just tempted all the time by all kinds of things.

The second is what's called demonic attack. Oddly enough, I think both my patients after their exorcism remained under demonic attack.

The third stage Francis MacNutt called oppression, where Francis compared it to a city where the enemy has gained control of a few suburbs.

Then there's full-scale possession where Francis said is where the enemy basically gets the center of the city, as well as the suburbs, and has control over the communications. There are just a few pockets of resistance left.

Almost completely.

Right. As Malachi Martin pointed out, if they 100 percent cooperated, then there would be no sign of any stress of strain within them.

So people who are possessed are not what I would call evil people. I pointed out in my book "People of the Lie" that I think that evil people are much more common.

Possession is still a very rare condition. Less rare than a great many people might think. And much less common than the Charismatics might believe.

Both cases were videotaped. With one we have close to 40 hours of tape. The other, close to 30. One of the most extraordinary things for me was the facial expression of these patients. In the first case, none of these facial expressions were captured on the video tape. The patient did not show any facial changes which were paranormal, except on one occasion when she had actually been trying to hide her face from the camera. It was just a few seconds long, when her face underwent a profound change. The second patient had this snake-like appearance which was evident to everybody on the team, but again, not picked up by the video camera. Now in following up that patient there were moments where I also saw in her--and maybe this is translated into some kind of intuitive kind of vision--but flashes of her looking like an amphibian or a lizard.

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